Inside the online offensive that turned out a new generation of men for Trump

President-elect Trump’s road back to the White House weaved through testosterone-fueled corners of the internet, breaking from the circuit of daytime talk shows and local radio broadcasts.

Trump flexed his arms with podcasting NFL players and chatted about aliens with YouTube wrestler Logan Paul. He served the Nelk Boys Chick-fil-A on his private jet “Trump Force One,” calling the group of YouTube pranksters a “modern-day Johnny Carson.” He riffed on surviving a July assassination attempt with the four-man comedy team behind “Flagrant,” a raunchy podcast that promises to deliver “unruly hot takes directly to your dome piece.”

The resulting memes, TikToks and YouTube videos landed Trump millions of views online - part of a sprawling online strategy that gave him a direct line to a giant fan base of young American men.

While many political strategists once viewed this group as liberal by default, young men between the ages of 18 and 29 swung enormously for Trump, shifting rightward by eight percentage points since 2020, according to network exit polls.

The day after the election, Team Trump advisers on X praised a group of young, self-described “s**tposters fueled by a lot of black coffee and Zyn” nicotine pouches for rewriting the political campaign playbook and introducing Make America Great Again to a new - and terminally online - generation of men.

Trump’s staggering showing among this demographic was the culmination of a years-long effort to reach young men devoted to the beacons of American machismo: pranks, combat sports, stand-up comedy and the often-misogynistic online fringe known as the “manosphere.”

The influencers and podcast hosts don’t have movie or TV deals, but command bigger audiences than many of traditional Hollywood actors thanks to online-media platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, where millions of Americans now get their news and spend their time.

Some of the influencers also boosted Trump offline: The Nelk Boys led a $20 million get-out-the-vote effort, focused on door-knocking at fraternity houses and targeting young men at college football tailgate parties.

This risky strategy of courting the audiences of Joe Rogan and the Nelk Boys more aggressively than viewers of traditional news programs or “Saturday Night Live” paid off on Election Day, propelling Trump’s first popular vote victory.

“People were able to see him for who he really is and not through the characterization of him by the mainstream media,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump campaign adviser who developed his podcast strategy. “That was a massive, massive victory for us this go around.”

The 78-year-old businessman - now the country’s oldest president-elect - was able to achieve what some are hailing as a political realignment in part by adapting his decades as a TV showman to live-streamed interviews on X, three-hour podcast chats and eye-catching TikToks.

These tactics reintroduced first-time voters to a candidate whose notorious 2015 ride down a golden Trump Tower escalator occurred when they were in elementary and middle school. Uniquely isolated during the pandemic, these young men turned to podcasts and influencers to navigate loneliness and stress, said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.

To them, Trump is “more of an antihero than a villain,” Della Volpe said.

Trump’s resounding showing in what some called the “battle of the sexes” election reflected his ability to harness a mounting angst among young men about their economic and cultural status in a society where young women are more educated and have more professional opportunities than previous generations.

“Trump is so good at channeling that frustration for people who feel they have no power,” said Hasan Piker, one of the internet’s most prominent left-wing streamers “He’s the best at saying, ‘You’re right to be angry and I’m gonna tell you exactly why you should be angry.’”

A cohort of young men were primed for that message.

Video games, wrestlers and fries

Trump’s first foray into podcasting came in 2022, 14 months after he left Washington in disgrace after failing to respond to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. At the time, he was largely exiled by major TV networks and banned from most social media. But the Nelk Boys were happy to welcome the former president on this show, “Full Send.”

In the interview taped at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, the former president talked about his friendship with Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, lamented the rising price of oil and claimed that Putin would never have invaded Ukraine if he were still in the White House.

“We look weak, we look stupid, we look like we don’t know what we’re doing, and nobody has ever seen the country like this,” Trump said on the episode, presented by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer.

YouTube pulled down the episode, citing a policy that at the time banned claims of widespread fraud during the 2020 election. The takedown, however, became an advertisement for the show and for Trump, who swiftly put out a statement decrying the “Big Tech lunatics” who removed the interview with the “very popular” influencers.

The appearance was just the start of Trump’s foray into the world of bro influencers, which accelerated as Election Day approached. He golfed with Bryson DeChambeau, talked energy prices with personal-finance podcaster Dave Ramsey and discussed religion and marijuana with the cerebral computer scientist Lex Fridman.

John McEntee, a former Trump White House staffer who has gained 3 million followers on TikTok for his right-wing quips such as “It’ll be funny to see how quickly feminists embrace the kitchen when World War 3 breaks out,” said Trump’s embrace of online media helped him capture a giant audience by “speaking to people where they are.”

“Whoever dominates the latest communication tool usually wins: Look at Trump with Twitter in 2016, Obama with Facebook, JFK with television, FDR with radio,” McEntee said. “Having Donald Trump, who’s this larger-than-life figure, joining these young platforms (like TikTok) was such a symbol that he was part of the culture.”

Some of Trump’s appearances were with online influencers preferred (and suggested) by his 18-year-old son, Barron, such as the video game streamer Adin Ross, who live-streamed a chat and dance routine with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. “My son Barron says hello, by the way. He’s a big fan of yours,” Trump told Ross, 24.

The strategy allowed Trump to tap into men who were not traditional conservatives. In mid-October, he appeared on “Six Feet Under,” a podcast hosted by his favorite wrestler Mark William Calaway, better known as “The Undertaker.” World Wrestling Entertainment fan pages had higher engagement than those of any other sport, and their audience was more moderate than many would assume, Bruesewitz said.

“It went like wildfire throughout all of the different fan pages,” he added. “We reached tens of millions of people that were not our average audience through that interaction.”

[Young Black and Latino men say they chose Trump because of the economy and jobs. Here’s how and why.]

That targeting of young men extended to the campaign’s digital-media operation, which worked to blast pro-Trump messages onto social media accounts with tens of millions of followers.

Dylan Johnson, 26, a deputy campaign director of communications, said the team adopted a “scorched earth” strategy when dealing with critics or journalists they felt were misrepresenting Trump - part of the team’s “no free shots on goal” policy that responded to every hit with a counterattack.

“We were in the cockpit, and we could fire at will whenever we saw something worth hitting,” Johnson said. “We can be a little flamethrower-y at times, but that’s part of the charm.”

Trump’s appearances on podcasts and meme-worthy antics accelerated when Kamala Harris entered the race, shaking up the campaign with a flood of online support in the form of memes and videos known as “fan edits.” As Trump drove at disaffected young men, Harris detoured the other way. She appeared on “Call Her Daddy,” a podcast popular with young women, and “All the Smoke,” a show hosted by two former NBA players popular with young, non-White men.

Long podcast interviews have a second life in clips, which circulate on social media and stories in traditional news outlets, Republican digital strategist Eric Wilson said. In an interview with comedian Theo Von, Trump candidly discussed how his older brother Fred’s struggle with addiction shaped his own decision not to drink, use drugs or smoke. A clip from the interview had nearly 3 million likes on TikTok.

Harris’s campaign created a small team of staffers to counter Trump on TikTok and other social media platforms, trolling him with short-video remixes and viral memes from a digital war room in Delaware. But Trump’s team adopted an irreverent tone of its own through attention-grabbing stunts like showing Trump slinging fries at a McDonald’s and driving a garbage truck, creating meme-worthy moments his team hoped would soften his public persona and break the mold for a political campaign.

Jackson Moore, a 19-year-old Iowa State University student, followed the campaign largely through watching reaction videos and clips from right-wing outlets like the Daily Wire on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. On mainstream media, Trump was compared to Adolf Hitler and his supporters to “fascists,” he said. But the online videos presented a more moderate Trump, Moore said, one “genuinely concerned” about real Americans’ issues.

So on Election Day, Moore cast his ballot for Trump.

The ‘mighty and powerful’

Ten days before Election Day, Trump left Michigan supporters waiting on an airplane tarmac in the cold, blaming the almost three-hour delay for his rally on taping an interview with Rogan, the world’s most popular podcaster.

The wide-ranging conversation covered the existence of UFOs, Trump’s continued denial of the 2020 election results and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un - and reached Rogan’s massive 80 percent male audience, according to data from Edison Research. Rogan’s interviews with Trump and his top allies, Vice President-elect JD Vance and X owner Elon Musk, have been viewed in total more than 78 million times on YouTube alone.

The strategy hit voters beyond the base of the Republican Party, where Trump had limited success in 2020.

“If you’re over the age of 45, you have an opinion of Trump, it doesn’t change. But there are a ton of young voters out there voting for the first time ever, and podcasts are a pretty effective way of reaching them,” Piker said. “Those guys aren’t watching MSNBC.”

Meanwhile, Harris spent the final days of the campaign with more traditional Hollywood icons. She appeared alongside actress Maya Rudolph in a sketch that opened “Saturday Night Live,” and on the eve of the election, she made her final appeal to voters alongside Oprah Winfrey and Lady Gaga at a rally on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

The same night, Rogan announced his endorsement of Trump, who celebrated the news onstage at a rally in Pittsburgh. On Election Day, Trump boosters made an overt appeal to men.

“Get every man you know to the polls,” tweeted Stephen Miller, a top adviser in the first Trump White House.

When Trump declared victory on Wednesday, he praised a swath of male influencers for their support during the election. He talked about his love for Musk and thanked “tough guy” and UFC CEO Dana White. White thanked the Nelk Boys, the “Bussin with the Boys crew, Von and “the mighty and powerful” Rogan.

It remains to be seen whether Trump - and the Republican Party - will be able to hold these young supporters as his administration gears up to pursue an aggressive plan to reshape American society.

Many Trump supporters in their late teens and early 20s admire Trump’s brand and his masculinity; they don’t recall his decision to pull out of the Paris agreement to combat climate change or his defense of white nationalists in the wake of the deadly 2017 Charlottesville rally, Della Volpe said.

“I don’t think the vast majority of younger, first-time Trump voters are voting for extreme policy,” he added.

Meryl Kornfield and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report